The past few decades have seen incredible development of technology and systems for computer assisted, image based, or image guided surgery. The advances in image guided surgery are tied in part to technological and scientific improvements in imaging and 3D computer graphics. For example, the early work of Mark Levoy, Turner Whitted, Richard Holloway, and Stephen Pizer in the late 1980s provided new 3D computer graphics rendering techniques, medical image shape detection, and head-mounted displays. These are some of the building blocks of later image-guided surgery systems built at the University of North Carolina in the mid 1990s and after.
Image guided surgery makes use of imaging to aid the surgeon to perform more effective or more accurate surgery. As merely one example of such image guided surgery, the use of ultrasound to guide needles being inserted into the liver for ablation are used by the surgeon to help guide the needle.
Current systems, however, have inadequate visualizations of image guidance data. This inadequate data may include the lack of useful information regarding an ablation needle and its potential effect on the procedure. Also, the equipment used for image guided surgery is typically difficult to calibrate. For example, each time a practitioner uses a new surgical instrument that must be optically tracked by an image guidance system, she must perform the following two steps. First, she must rigidly affix the tracking fiducials to the needle. This may involve tightening screws, or to threading a needle through a hole or tube. Second, she must measure the position of the tip of the needle, relative to the fiducials. This may involve manually measuring the surgical instrument length with a ruler, and then entering this information into a workstation; or using a dedicated calibration rig, and perform a lengthy (e.g., several minute) calibration process.
These problems and others are addressed by the systems, methods, devices and computer-readable media described herein.